Crux: NLFD24

Enslaved black people who claimed they were content might have just been showing white people what they knew they wanted to see. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a duplicitous character named Bledsoe castigates the narrator for taking a white university donor to a poor, black section of a southern town, and says “Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!” If Douglass is describing black people who had the same belief as Ellison’s character, this may explain why white people received reports that confirmed their beliefs about black peoples’ supposed acceptance of slavery.

In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs refers sarcastically to the idea of enslaved peoples’ supposed contentment as she describes the tumult that passed through her town because of Nat Turner’s insurrection. Jacobs suggests that if white people truly believed their slaves were happy, they wouldn’t have been so worried about a revolt.

This reference to the wariness of a black person “when speaking to an untried man” is echoed later in the text, in Chapter Seven, when Douglass describes his interaction with two Irish men who advise him to run away. Douglass pretends he doesn’t understand what the men are saying. Because he doesn’t know who they are and he thinks there’s a chance that they “might be treacherous,” he guards against the prospect that they could encourage him to run just so they’re able to catch him and exploit him. Similarly, Douglass characterizes himself and other enslaved black people as hesitant to be forthright with a white person who asked how they were treated by a master, because there was always a chance that their words could be used against them.

In “The Story of O.J.,” Jay-Z raps, “Please don’t die over the neighborhood that your mama rentin.'” This highlights the irony of the fact that black people are currently willing to kill each other over territory that’s owned by white people, much like enslaved black people fought about who had the best master, as Douglass notes.